His life changed forever at a place in the Pacific dubbed "Suicide Creek." A Marine in World War II, he went on to be one of the most respected historians and sought-after battlefield guides in the nation. He is credited with locating and helping to raise one of the most significant artifacts of the Civil War, the ironclad gunboat Cairo. Referred to by many as a national treasure and acclaimed as one of the stars of Ken Burns's award-winning PBS series, The Civil War, the historian emeritus of the National Park Service talked recently with Naval History Editor Fred L. Schultz at his office in Washington, D.C.
Naval History: We'll get around to some Civil War questions, but first, let's talk about World War II. What made you decide to join the Marine Corps?
Bearss: My father was a Marine in Haiti during World War I. But I probably joined the Marine Corps because of my cousin, Hiram I. Bearss, better known as "Hiking Hiram." He entered the Marine Corps during the Spanish-American War, got out briefly, then went back in and served in the Philippines Insurrection. He was on Samar and became a recipient of the Medal of Honor.
He also is one of the few Marines to command Army troops in World War I. First, he commands the 102d Infantry Regiment, then he commands a brigade in the 26th Yankee Division. He gets the Distinguished Service Cross, which is the Army's equivalent of the Navy Cross; a French Legion of Merit; and the Distinguished Service Medal. He was one of the most decorated Marines, but he also was a character whom you probably wouldn't want to emulate too much in your personal life. I'd heard a lot about him, and I met him once when I was ten years old. The story was that his father had been a wheelhorse in the Republican Party since it was formed in 1854. My family members were big kidders, so they sent me to his house in Peru, Indiana, to ask if this was the Democratic headquarters. That was the only time I met him and heard some of his stories.
Naval History: Tell us what you remember most about your service in World War II.
Bearss: Of course, what I remember most is the day I got shot. It was on 2 January in 1944. The 3d Battalion 7th Marines—in which I was a member of L Company, 2d Platoon—and the 3d Battalion 5th Marines were to do a sweep in front of the lines at Cape Gloucester on New Britain.
We'd been on patrols out there a number of times. We had the perimeter set up, and we were to sweep the lines in front of 2d Battalion 7th and 1st Battalion 7th. I was a scout. We advanced about a half-mile or a mile. Out in front, we approach a creek flowing perpendicular to our line of advance and into the perimeter. As we approach, the other scout and myself see the ground is very level, until we reach the edge of the declivity that will take us into the creek.
The creek itself is probably 10-15 feet wide. We don't know at the time the Japanese have dug their pillboxes into the side of the bank, on the opposite side, just below the lip. We can see several Japanese soldiers. We don't know whether they're decoys or what, but they seem oblivious to our approach.
We check with the squad leader, who says, "Open fire!" So we open fire on them. Within a minute or less, all hell breaks loose. They are using the heavy Hotchkiss type, 7.7, the same as the French Army used in World War I. It feeds by a clip of about 30 rounds, and it has a rather slow cyclic rate of fire. It fires like a woodpecker: bop . . . bop . . . bop.
The machine gun squad supporting us is not set up yet. We start to move down off the lip and down the creek bank. The slope is probably about 45°. I'm on my haunches when all of a sudden the gun immediately opposite me, about 35 yards off, starts firing. He's firing to my left and already getting hits. At that point, they hit the gunnery sergeant off to my left. Then they start searching back toward myself and the guys to my right.
The first bullet hits me in the left elbow. It feels like a sledgehammer. Probably fortunately, it pulls me somewhat to the left. The next round hits me in the right shoulder and lodges in my chest at about the tenth rib. They're hitting men all over. Our machine gun never gets set up. Both BAR [Browning automatic rifle] men in our squad are killed. Our battalion commander has lost control of the situation. The 2d and 3d platoon of L Company are pinned down, and we're going to lose, dead and wounded, probably 60%. In a matter of about five minutes, our squad alone is going to have five killed and six wounded, one of whom will subsequently die.
Naval History: How did you make it out of there?
Bearss: How did I get out? I'm lying downhill on the creek bank, and I don't know whether I have a left arm below the elbow, because it's twisted around, and it's numb. I know the shoulder wound does no nerve damage, because I can see the bullet hole there. So I lay there a while.
We're trying to get corpsmen to come up, but they can't. So finally, I start to get up. I don't know how to do it. I try to turn myself around. Normally it's very difficult to move up at a 45° angle, but not being able to use your arms makes it even more difficult to get on your knees.
So I'm thrashing around, trying to get at least pointed uphill, and the Japanese see the movement. They open fire again, and this time they hit me through the left buttocks and shoot off the left side of my heel. At the time, I don't know how much they shot off. It feels like a whip hitting me.
That was the only time I got angry. I'd been pretty cool up until then, trying to figure how to get out. We knew they didn't take prisoners, but I was wondering why they were shooting at a wounded man. They were within easy voice range of us, so I shouted some epithets at them.
Then I lay there probably two hours. I notice it is getting dark, but it's now only about noon. I begin to wonder if I'm dying. I look to my right, and Private Floyd Martin is over there behind a log. I say, "Martin, can you get my helmet out of my eyes? I can't see."
He says, "I'm afraid I can't do it, but I'll see if I can reach you with my rifle." He reaches over with his rifle and is able to use the barrel to knock the helmet upward. So then I can see and watch. The Japanese fire the same way we do, probably one tracer to three ball. So I can tell where the gun immediately opposite me is firing.
Another gun is to my right, not immediately in front of me. The guy with the gun immediately opposite me, in the pillbox, evidently sees some guys moving off to my right and starts firing at them. I can see where his tracers are going.
At that time, you don't know you can get superhuman strength. I'm able some way to turn myself at least partially sideways, so I can get a little roll. I get myself up and walk on my knees to where the bank levels off. Off to my right I can see the machine gun squad, who didn't even get set up. If they're not all dead, they're all dying by that time. The Japanese gunner sees me, but he can't get his gun low enough to hit me.
I'm then lying on my back, because when I fell, I flipped that way. I can see the tracers, which look like they're very close to hitting me. By this time, our platoon leader is killed trying to get people out. Some men are going to get medals that day, and it's questionable whether some should. Lieutenant Thomas J. O'Leary, a New York Irishman, is the commander of the weapons platoon. He and a corpsman named Hartman get a lot of guys out. But they don't get any medals.
So they come up. They have to lie flat and push with their feet, because they can't crawl; that's how low the tracers are. Hartman inches around and gives me a shot of morphine. O'Leary says to me, because I'm lying with my head toward them, "We cannot get on our knees. Can you stand it if we pull you by your dungarees?" I said, "Yes, any way to get me out of here." So what they've got to do now is use their toes, as they're perfectly flat, and pull me probably 30 yards before they're able to get on their knees and move me to a battalion aide station, about 300 yards back.
There, they put me on a stretcher and—just like you see them doing in the stills from World War II, or in Vietnam—they stick the rifle and the bayonet in the ground and hang the plasma bottle from it. The first thing they do is give you plasma to combat shock.
And then, assuming that everybody smoked, which I didn't, the poor corpsman sticks a cigarette in my mouth. So I have to spit it out.
The stretcher bearers have to haul me probably a half-mile. Japanese mortars are firing again, and they drop me. They finally get me to a jeep, which they needed because of the mud. Gloucester has the heaviest rainfall average in the world: 400 inches in the rainy season. So they slip stretchers on a jeep.
When they get me to the regimental aide station, they strip me. Since I'm shot in both the lower and upper extremities, I'm in the same condition as when I came into this world: nude.
After they do that, the corpsman says, "Are you hungry"? And I say, "Yes." And he says, "What do you want?" And I say, "What have you got?" So he says "We've got a gallon of tomato juice," not knowing that I'm a glutton. So he punches the tomato juice, and he has to hold it, of course, because both of my arms are in splints now. After I've finished about half the gallon of tomato juice, it comes up all over the good samaritan.
I stay in the regimental aide station for two-and-a-half days. By that time shock has set in and I have very little memory of it. They're not able to get planes to the strips, so they evacuate on an LST [tank landing ship]. The LST has probably the worst smell I ever smelled in my life. Some of about 250 guys haven't had a bandage changed in two-and-a-half, three days, like me. Nothing stinks like blood.
Then I go to an evac hospital, which would be like a division hospital in the Civil War under [Union surgeon Jonathan] Letterman's plan. There they clean me up and put me in plaster of Paris casts that they used at that time. I look like the mummy's curse, and I'll be in the casts for about eight months.
I've since become interested in tracing how similar and how dissimilar the medical experience was between the Civil War and World War II. First, in the Civil War I probably would have died of shock. But the plasma took care of that. To the lesser extreme, I would have lost my left arm in the Civil War and probably my right arm, too.
Naval History: Let's get to the Civil War. Why do you think only a handful of historians have addressed the naval aspects of it?
Bearss: I think it's a tragedy and a serious mistake that they do not focus on the Navy very much. I would submit that without the Navy, without the security it gives on inland waters, [Union General] Ulysses S. Grant's army campaigning in the heartland of America—where there are no through north-south railroads as we know them—might have found itself facing the same situation Bonaparte faced in Russia in 1812.
I don't think he could have subsisted and supported this army, particularly once it was south of New Madrid and definitely when he gets to Vicksburg. I don't think he could have gone across the river. You need the logistic support given by the Navy and the protection it gives to transportation in the Mississippi Valley. You can argue that [Major General William T.] Sherman, who is dependent on railroads until he goes to the sea, never would have reached Atlanta were it not for naval forces.
The rivers are important adjuncts to that advance from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The Cumberland and the Ohio Rivers in particular supplement the railroads. And then you also have the blockade cutting off and isolating the Confederacy.
So there is definitely a failure to understand the role of the Navy and its important and vital contribution to Union success. Why is that? The Navy certainly has some interesting personalities, but they don't get the same treatment as Grant and [Confederate General Robert E.] Lee. [Union Navy Rear Admiral David Dixon] Porter gets high profile, but others do not. You have young dashing heroes like [Union Navy Lieutenant William B.] Cushing, whose actions equal anything the young Army officers do. The problem is that we need somebody with the skills of a Bruce Catton to tell the naval story. Unfortunately, Ken Burns did not focus on it in his series, which would have been better yet, because a lot more people watch television than read about the role of the Navy in the Civil War.
Naval History: How did you become interested in the hardluck ironclad, the Cairo?
Bearss: I first got interested in Cairo when I went to Vicksburg. Most historians of the Civil War, except the iconoclasts, were interested in the war in the East. And I went to Vicksburg only because that's where there was an opening. If they had asked me where I wanted to go, it would have been any one of the Eastern battlefields over Vicksburg.
I would argue that Grant's Vicksburg campaign is far more of a masterpiece than [Confederate Lieutenant General Thomas J. "Stonewall"] Jackson's Valley campaign. It's a war of maneuver over an area with no satisfactory roads. He out-maneuvers the enemy, and he fights them every time he outnumbers them. That's a good general, in my opinion. But he will not succeed without the Navy.
So I got interested in the naval aspect of the Vicksburg campaign and the Cairo in particular. I went to Snyder's Bluff one day and I'm talking to some locals up there. They ask me if I want see the Cairo, and I say yes. So they walk me down to the Yazoo River below the bluff and they say, there she is. I say, no, that can't be the Cairo, because I know from the written record, from the paper trail, that she is not under fire when she is sunk. I know she is at least two-and-a-half miles from Snyder's Bluff. This must be the raft the Confederates positioned in the Yazoo, covered by the Confederate batteries.
They said I didn't know what I was talking about and called me just a Yankee historian. So that's kind of a challenge. Don Jacks, a maintenance man at the park, knew the river well. He said, "I don't know where the Cairo is, and we don't know much about her, but I can tell you one thing. If something sinks in the mud of the Yazoo, which has a very stable course but silts very rapidly, it's going to be where it sank."
And then Warren Grabau, who was an engineer and geologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, became interested. He knew a lot about the Civil War, too, like I did. Jacks's contribution was practical knowledge. So we decided to go out to see if we could find the ship.
Our research pretty well indicated that the vessel sank three-quarters of a mile below Blake's lower plantation, which was a site we could locate. We knew it could be that distance, but it could be on either the right bank or left bank, the left bank if you're facing downstream or the right bank if you're going upstream.
Since we had no government support, we had to pick Armistice Day, which was a day off for us. We had a very sensitive World War II compass and we drifted down the bank, beginning at Blake's lower plantation, holding a course about 10-15 yards off the bank. We know the vessel had been driven on the bank bow on, so we also know she's going to be nearly perpendicular to the bank, with her stern slightly downstream. And that's how we find her.
But, of course, finding her is the easy part. First, we have to get confirmation that she isn't just a pile of junk. After confirming it, we wonder how are we going to raise her. We have lots of enthusiasm but very little money, and it becomes a long struggle. We first spotted the vessel in November 1956, and we raised the first substantive part of her—the pilothouse—in the third week of September 1960.
We will raise most of the vessel. If we'd had several million dollars, the ideal way to raise the vessel would have been to divert the river and do an archeological project. If we had been able to do that, we would have recovered everything, because the vessel sank in 12 minutes.
With the Cairo, we didn't have the moral problem involving the Tecumseh, and the moral problem they have with Hunley, which have remains on board. With the Cairo, there would be no human remains.
Naval History: How do you feel about that? Should we raise everything?
Bearss: No, I do not think we should raise everything. I think if there are bodies aboard a ship, a naval ship, or a ship belonging to the United States, it's a tomb, and you treat tombs with respect. I would argue against raising the Monitor and Tecumseh, because they're lying in an unnatural position, upside down. If you tried to raise them, their hulls undoubtedly would collapse, and you will have violated the tomb.
Naval History: Let's talk about the National Park Service. As you know, the mission changed in the 1930s to encompass more than the natural parks. Do you think that was a good thing, or do you think the military parks and historic sites should have gone to some other agency?
Bearss: In the long run, I would say it would have probably been better to create a Department of Cultural Affairs or something to that effect. The Park Service is still basically natural resources-oriented. Take battlefield preservation, for instance. Granted, you can never restore a battlefield, but you can restore the environment. When I speak of environment, I refer to the vegetative environment. But there is the belief that if they're parks, the trees are safe. When park superintendents set out to remove vegetation to restore the appearance of a battlefield, they usually run into firestorms.
Naval History: If you could have changed anything while you were working for the Park Service, what would it have been?
Bearss: That would have been one of the things. Get your historical base map, make a decision on what areas are going to be restored, at least as to their vegetative appearance, and do it.
For instance, Vicksburg now—except for a selective number of vistas—is a jungle. In 1939, Vicksburg was as open as it was at the time of the siege. Since 1939, it has grown up into thick woods. But the wooded areas would not be thick, because the farmers ran cattle and hogs in the woods. And they logged their woods, because they didn't burn coal. I'd rather go to Gettysburg in the winter. In all these areas where it's important to understand what you can see, I'd rather take the chance of cold weather when the leaves are gone.
The Park Service had better find somebody to replace [Fredericksburg historian] Bob Krick, who has retired. They need to find a few people with his communication skills and knowledge of the resources as the chiefs of interpretation and history in the parks. That's what I'm afraid will not happen. He knows the political system so that he can go outside the bureau to get support. He also has deep knowledge of his subject and a love of the resource.
When you see the Bob Kricks of the world retire, you wonder.